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ISI Gets new DG, who is known as Political Manipulator

On June 13 Pakistan replaced
the current Director General of Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID),
Lt Gen Asim Munir, who had only spent 8 months on the job, with Lt Gen Faiz
Hameed.

Hameed is a hardliner general who has spent time in the ISI
earlier. As Reuters notes,
“Hameed was seen to be hugely influential within ISI during his previous stint
at the agency, according to analysts. He was one of the figures who brokered
the Faizabad agreement in late 2017, when protesters blocked off roads into
capital Islamabad, in an incident that further stoked civilian-military
tensions. “He is very hardline,” said Ayesha Siddiqa, an analyst who has also
written a book about the military’s business empire, and has been a
longstanding critic. “It’s a very hawkish decision. It means the military is
not backing down, and it’s going to use more force.”

According to investigative journalist Taha
Siddiqui “It’s quite rare to see such high-profile restructuring within the
top posts of the military, given that the last spymaster Lt Gen Asim Muneer
only spent eight months in the office of the DG, ISI, and has now been
transferred to lead a corps in the Punjab province.”

Siddiqui
notes that “it is believed that the current Army Chief, General Qamar
Bajwa, who has only four months left in office, is consolidating his power and
bringing his favourites to the top in a bid to secure an extension. However, at
this stage this is mere speculation, and the Pakistan Army in the past has had
to face strong criticism whenever its chiefs have sought extensions in their
tenure which normally lasts for three years. The last time an army chief got an
extension was in 2010, when the then head of the Pakistani military, General
Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, got a three year extension and faced immense criticism over
it.”

As Siddiqui points out Faiz
Hameed “is from the Baloch Regiment, and in recent times he has also been
the in-charge, for the internal security wing at the ISI. Given the
tight-lipped nature of the military, we may never get to know the official
reason as to why the spy chief was changed, but General Faiz’s credentials in
the recent past do give an idea about what is to come under his tenure as the
chief of the spy agency, the ISI, known for its controversial practices within
Pakistan and in the region.”

The
new DG ISI’s name “first appeared during the 2017 sit-in staged by a
pro-blasphemy law political extremist group called the Tehreek-e-Labbaik
Pakistan (TLP), who had blocked a major entrance into Islamabad city for weeks,
demanding the then government of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to punish
those who had proposed changes in the oath the parliamentarians are supposed to
recite when elected. The change in some of the words were deemed blasphemous by
the TLP.”

Hameed’s
name “resurfaced again in July 2018 when former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif
called General Faiz the main man behind the political wheeling and dealing that
saw Sharif’s party losing the 2018 general elections. Sharif alleged that he
was the man forcing the former’s party members to switch loyalties.”

Finally,
Hameed’s “appointment comes at a crucial time for a few other reasons apart
from that of Bajwa’s extension. Pakistan is currently facing immense internal
pressures from multiple fronts, with the main one being a grass-roots rights
movement called the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) that has challenged the
military narrative about so-called ‘War on Terror’, and is exposing the
military’s abusive human rights practices in their region next to the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The military has unsuccessfully tried to crush
this movement, but it has only gotten bigger. Secondly, the country’s combined
political opposition in the Parliament has been threatening for country-wide
protests due to the economic mismanagement of the Khan-led PTI government that has
pushed Pakistan towards bankruptcy and a downward spiral of most economic
indicators. In such a scenario, it appears that General Hameed has been brought
in to ensure that any political and intellectual opposition in the country is
effectively crushed, and Pakistan’s slide toward absolute authoritarianism
continues unhindered.”